"Roundheads and Ramblings"

grammar cops

ProWritingAid--Here's Looking at You, Sticky Wickets

Posted on Monday, April 02, 2018 9:32 AM

In last week’s blog, I introduced you to a new editing program—ProWritingAid. Now, as promised, here’s how the correction process worked for me.

When I tested ProWriting Aid, I started with Style. The style problems included readability issues, glue words, passive verbs, hidden verbs (I had to look that one up!), long subordinate clauses, adverbs used outside of dialogue, sentences with repeated beginnings (like words all ending in -ing), and examples of telling rather than showing. The program underlined each instance, explained why it was wrong, and usually offered suggestions for improvement. The program identifies 73 style problems in my 2300-word chapter, each one of which I corrected before moving on.

But that was only the beginning. There were nineteen other categories. Each type of problem must be treated separately. Now, not all of them had as many errors as my style section did. I even received a perfect score of 100 on the section devoted to clichés. But the whole process—doing the summary, running each of the twenty sections, and then running the summary again to see if the scores improved (THEY DID!) took close to five hours. And that was for just one chapter. By the time the book is finished, there will be close to 50 chapters. That’s 250 hours—or 31 workdays of 8 hours a day.

Is ProWritingAid worth that much time? I don’t have enough information yet to answer that question. If my editing speed does not increase, and if every chapter has as many errors as the first one did, my answer may be negative. However, if, as the ads promise, using the program also trains me to be a better writer, then the answer is yes. I noticed this morning that, as I wrote, I stopped myself several times to reword a sentence and eliminate a passive, to remove extra spaces, and to vary the length and beginnings of sentences. So it has already alerted me to pay more attention to my bad writing habits.

In general, if I compare this program to Grammarly, this one covers more problems and offers more training. In Grammarly, the writer sees all the errors at once, and the explanations bounce around from one topic to another. With this one, the same topic repeats until only a complete blockhead could miss the point. ProWritingAid also covers some issues that Grammarly never touches.

The best example has to do with the “sticky sentences” and “glue words” I mentioned in the last post. Once in a while Grammarly will point to an unnecessary word, but ProWritingAid performs major surgery on long sentences.

Here’s a sticky sentence:
“Once in a great while, something or someone you’ve never noticed before comes along and has the effect of catching every bit of your attention.” [26 words]

And the fix:
“Sometimes a new idea catches your attention. [7 words]

Glue words add no information and slow readers down. They make a sentence sticky because the reader takes a long time to find the end.

Particularly, glue words may come in expressions like “once in a great while,” “has the effect of,” “every bit of.” My own worst glue words, I have discovered, are “all of,” as in “I ate all of my dinner” instead of “I ate my dinner.” “I did all of my writing in bed” instead of saying “I wrote it in bed.”

(I must pause here to point out that NaNoWriMo participants may not want to eliminate sticky sentences. If a writer is only interested in word counts, sticky sentences are great. If the same writer is more interested in ideas, those extra words get in the way. My solution: Write sticky and then cut with vicious abandon.)

For now, if you need to choose between Grammarly and ProWritingAid, I suggest you try both free versions and see which one you like best.

And about that terminally boring title: ProWritingAid. It's clear, descriptive, and serious, as all grammar police tend to be. But in my own mind from now on, I intend to call it "STICKY WICKETS."

Take a Deep Breath and Add a Comma

Posted on Tuesday, July 24, 2012 10:52 AM

Over the weekend, I spent some time editing articles (identities hidden)--not for content, particularly, but for the pesky little errors that make language purists throw up their hands in despair. Does a misplaced comma matter? Well, yes it does, if it gives your reader the impression that you're not a polished (or well-edited) writer.

I understand that rules about how to use commas make you turn purple. No wonder! But instead of taking a correction as an insult, let’s see if we can make the rules easier.

Commas are a relatively recent invention. When the Romans ﬁrst started writing things down, they didn’t have punctuation marks. They didn’t have spaces for that matter, or lower case letters.

SOALLTHEIRWRITINGLOOKEDLIKETHISOBVIOUSLYTHATWASA PROBLEMFORTHEPOORGUYWHOHADTOREADIT

Just as spaces showed a reader when one word stopped and another started, so commas told a reader when to breathe. They were especially welcome when sentences grew longer than “Me hungry. Kill deer.”

Some rules are pretty straight-forward. If you start a sentence with phrases or clauses that describe or limit the main idea in some way, you need to separate that group of words from the main clause, as:

"While I was reading your book, I found myself irritated by missing commas."

If you write a sentence that has two complete ideas in it, they need to be joined by a comma and a conjunction, not just run together, as :

I walked into the room, and everybody stared at me.

On other occasions, a comma becomes necessary to make the meaning clearer. Try reading this sentence out loud: “At the grocery we bought the following items: peas and carrots and macaroni and cheese and chicken and dumplings.”

Obviously you need to replace some of the ands with commas, but which ones? That will depend on how many separate items appeared on the cash register tape. Did you buy peas, carrots, a box of dry macaroni, a package of cheese, a whole chicken, and some frozen dumplings for a total of six items? Or did you just buy three: peas and carrots, macaroni and cheese, and chicken and dumplings? Read the two versions aloud and listen for the places where you take a breath or at least pause.

Other comma rules apply to things like appositives, direct address, and restrictive versus nonrestrictive clauses. You won’t need such esoteric terms if you apply the pause rule. Consider this scenario. A ﬁre occurred in the middle of the night at a rooming house where several men were living. Deaths resulted. How many died?

“The men who were asleep died in the ﬁre.” (The sleepers died. The poker-players did not.) “The men, who were asleep, died in the ﬁre.” (They were all asleep and they all died.)

Listen for the pauses. Add commas.

As an aside, academics sometimes argue over what is called the Oxford comma. That’s the one that appears before the ﬁnal “and” in a series. When I read a series of terms (like pens, notebooks, pencils, and erasers), I hear a pause after pencils, so I always use the Oxford comma. In other words, I follow my own rule about hearing commas. You may, however, encounter an editor who thinks that extra comma is not only unnecessary but adds an extra expense--one likely to drag the publisher into instant bankruptcy. She will tell you that a comma takes the place of an “and”, so you never need both. My advice? Don’t waste your breath on an argument in which both sides are right. Gracefully bow out, taking your Oxford commas with you. (Because editors always win.)

RULE: A NATURAL PAUSE INDICATES THE NEED FOR A COMMA. PUT IT IN.

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grammar cops

ProWritingAid--Here's Looking at You, Sticky Wickets

Take a Deep Breath and Add a Comma